


Lines in Stone

by ironikolai



Category: Life of the Party D&D (Web Series)
Genre: A train of thought while Vanden is imprisoned, Angst, Angst and Tragedy, Countrywide lockdown is doing things to me lmao, Gen, Implied spoilers, Imprisonment, Isolation, Its 3am which means suffering for characters, Memory Loss, Spoilers, Wrongful Imprisonment, sorry Vanden, y'all im so sorry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-26
Updated: 2020-03-26
Packaged: 2021-02-28 19:00:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23322085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ironikolai/pseuds/ironikolai
Summary: Pre-campaign, Vanden du Argentfort is trapped in isolation and endless darkness. Starved of contact and answers, it's easy to begin to lose yourself. To blame yourself. And, sometimes, the only thing that grounds you is another line etched into stone.Another day. He made it another day.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 17





	Lines in Stone

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen the sky.

When _had_ it been? It was impossible to keep track of the time. The lines scratched into the stone wall with blunted, bloody fingernails offered little in the ways of certainty. At one time they had, when it had been easier to count the seconds, minutes, hours that the darkness pressed into him. Those numbers had been an anchor. They were the only thing he could be sure was real, really. But they too slipped into obscurity. There was only so long you could count before the numbers blurred together and lost meaning entirely. After a while, Vanden couldn’t be sure he was marking the days off accurately. Pretty soon after that, the lines became a way to fill the time.

The cell was stagnant and dark, devoid of any light aside from the flickering torches brought by guard patrols every three hours. When the lines became enjoyment, a sting in his fingers that reminded him he was alive, the torches were time. They were heat. They were something that existed beyond the confines of his cell.

Vanden was grateful for it. He also despised it. The exact reasons for his imprisonment were unclear, too hazy to be sure but just real enough to form a pit in his stomach when they flashed through his mind. One thing, however, was obvious. The torches made it real.

In the dark, enveloped in cold and tepid air, it was like being asleep. Nails to the stone, he could make it so that the memories that looped in the back of his mind were far away. All that mattered was the lines. But the torches? Every time they came around, seeming sooner each time, they made everything so bright. Every time, he’d recoil as far from the dancing flames as he could, waiting for the glinting through the barred window of the cell door to vanish and wishing that the stone would swallow him completely and make it impossible for the light to reach him. Light brought memories. If something existed beyond the endless, tumbling darkness around him, then so did those sudden, jarring flashes of that day.

The screams. The cacophony as the castle collapsed into chaos. The confusion. The flashes of white light where seconds, minutes, hours blurred together.

It was difficult to process. His memory had been… _patchy_ for as long as he could remember. What little he did remember of that day, that _awful_ day, was too vague to determine if he was guilty or not. When the torches brought the memories and the lines could no longer keep them at bay, the only constant was the gut-wrenching tether of guilt. That was enough to convince him, after the seemingly endless sequence of hours, days, weeks, that wherever he was, he deserved this darkness.

Mattjin had seemed so _certain_. The look on his face after he returned from sea, attacked by the same mercenaries that had doomed the Silver Fortress. After they’d found Vanden alive after the attack. After they’d dragged him away from a fallen body, so familiar in its delicate stature yet evasive in identity, neck too bent. It all seemed to confirm his worse fears. Mattjin’s expression had been… _pitying_ would be the wrong word. It was strange. It was the kind of exasperated expression one would give a puppy that had been caught misbehaving one too many times. Faintly disapproving, veiled with a hurt designed to evoke a sense of guilt in the perpetrator. Distinctly sad. Vaguely condescending. Mattjin had always had that quality, an air of faint dislike and arrogance that had made Vanden’s reading of him at that moment almost as unreliable as his memories.

He’d pleaded. Of course he had. Clapped in irons and only half coherent, head a blur of mismatched memories and fear, Vanden had cried for his brother until his throat burned and his face was raw with tears. He’d sobbed until he was too exhausted to even wipe away the drying salt on his cheeks. The dread he felt was crushing. The confusion made it worse. The longer he waited for his brother to come, the more suffocating it became. He couldn’t trust himself, so slowly he accepted that darkness and lines were his fate. That he would die down there, in the dark. That it was a well-deserved punishment fitting a crime that, although not entirely clear to him, he grew to fear uncovering more and more each time the torches passed.

He wasn’t sure the guard patrols even knew he was in there. That part of the dungeon he wasn’t familiar with and, judging from the crude conversations that a few of the guards had as they passed, it was likely one of the deeper, disused cell quadrants that was a go-between for different guard posts. Not somewhere a prince frequented.

Maybe that’s why Mattjin had yet to find him. Vanden had been there for so long now. He knew it had been weeks, at least. Between the odour of his clothes, the matting of his hair, the stone lines and the food that staff snuck him every few days, that much was clear. So it must be that the guards, angry at the attack, had hidden him. He knew that Mattjin must be looking for him. Mattjin knew Vanden could be confused. He hadn’t asked what Vanden had seen before he’d been locked away, but surely he intended to. They were brothers. Brothers did not forsake one another. Mattjin, always distant but never unloving, wild and arrogant and superficial, who’d played pirates with him and Jocelyn as children, was sometimes hot-headed – it was a family trait – but he would never leave his own brother to this fate. Consumed in darkness, left to rot in isolation, alive only thanks to the servants that snuck aid where they could. Even at his angriest, Mattjin had never been cruel. It must be an oversight. It must be.

Vanden closed his eyes. It made little difference but seeing darkness and shutting it out were two vastly different things. In the time he’d been in the cell, that much he had come to understand perfectly. One he could tolerate. The other was terrifying. The only reassurance that he wouldn’t fall into the gaping maw of darkness around him was the stone, cold and slick against his back. How he’d avoided a fever thus far was beyond his comprehension. His clothes were never dry, rags compared to what they were before they’d shut him away but the sensation of the constant damp chill was a discomfort that had long since stopped bothering him. At least he was rooted. The longer he was trapped there, the more tangible the dark seemed. The more likely it felt that the chill would only keep it at bay for so long. The more afraid he became.

He would die there. Alone in the darkness.

Each new line on the stone became a prayer. He could only hope that Bahamut could hear his prayers from such a godless place. That the god had not forsaken him, too. But there was still that niggling little voice, whispering from either the corner of his mind or the corner of the cell. He wasn’t sure which. It told him his worst fears. It reminded him that, if Mattjin was right, if he was as guilty as he felt, deep in his chest, then Bahamut’s abandonment would be earned. The god was justice. Honour. The siege… it was not a thing of honour. That much he was certain of. And the longer Vanden waited, pressing closer and closer to the stone for relief, feeling himself almost melding into it, the more he knew his prayers would go unanswered.

He opened his eyes. It made little difference. Seconds, minutes, hours of darkness never changed. He wondered when it was he’d even stopped hallucinating. Your mind plays tricks on you when you’re like that. In darkness, alone, a few days from starving. Even those, however, had abandoned him.

The lump in his throat was a permanent fixture now. He’d only noticed it when he realised he’d forgotten what fresh air felt like. The salty breeze that flooded Mirrortail in the early morning. From the Silver Fortress, he could see the city as it came to life. The bustle never seemed to make it as far as the fortress but was a reassuring sight in the odd hours that Vanden was unburdened by his duties. He missed it. He missed the screaming reels of seabirds above him. He missed the wind in his face. He missed his mother.

For a moment, he could almost feel it. The wind cold on his cheeks but not stagnant. Fresh. New. The warmth of his mother at his back as they sat in the gardens, watching the world go by. He must only have been a young boy. He still let people touch him then. But then the torches passed by again, snatching the breeze away. Snatching the memory away. And then he was back in his cell again. The air still stale and unmoving, reeking of sweat and mildew. As the torches sucked last of their light from view, the darkness moved to replace it, silent but alive. There were no seabirds here. No clamour of the city. Just silence. Silence and the stone beneath his fingertips.

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen the sky.

He drew another line.

**Author's Note:**

> I really don't know what the fuck this was. Personal venting through Vanden's tragic backstory? Probably? Self-gratuitous angst? Most definitely. I mainly just wanted to put isolation into words. Uncertainty and depression and self-doubt and self-hatred into words. I'm not quite sure I managed it. It's probably not 100% accurate to the canon material released about Vanden's backstory thus far, but it's a vent. 
> 
> Vanden, baby, I'm so sorry. You deserve so much better. 
> 
> Also please forgive any typos and things. Whenever I write anything LotP related, it's usually about 3am when it's finished because it's usually a personal tangent so... here we are. 
> 
> I hope you liked it!  
> ~ N


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